2015-08-02

3 static web site hosting solutions - Day 1

Today I explored three of the provider I listed yesterday:

Aerobatic
This one is actually not free, only in public beta, the publishing is bit complicated, requires a npm package (so nodes and command line) and a special directory structure, but it provides an api gateway, and supports oauth with popular services, and has a simulator mode, so it provides some extra services, but it is cumbersome to setup and your require a GitHub account to sign up.

Bitballoon
This is the simplest one of the lot, just drag and drop your folder and BAM, it's published. I am pretty sure they worked very hard to build this one feature. Sign up with GitHub or Persona (the Mozilla id) - you can automate through a ruby gem or a REST API published at https://github.com/BitBalloon/bitballoon-api. It has some very nice versioning feature (you can restore previous version) and provides some password protection for private site, and collect form data for you.

GitHub Pages
This is by far the most complete solution, but entirely based on git, Though it compatible with Chromebook because you can do all the editing online, in their basic but working editor, using markdown, or just HTML. They have an option to generate a site with templates (using markdown). You can also setup your own domain by editing a CNAME file in the repository.

Comparing those three, I would say BitBalloon wins for it's simplicity, but GitHub wins for it's completeness, I wasn't overwhelmed by Aerobatic if it wasn't for integration with bitbucket which could redeem them - but I have yet to explore more this integration build on the new Atlassian Connect API for BitBucket.